The President is making another swing into town tomorrow, May 10th. That means you can expect lots of traffic tie-ups, which, in our bus-dominant world, means transit delays. Two major closures to be aware of are at Convention Place Station and Pine Street. Metro has more details here:
From about 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Convention Place Station (CPS) in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel will be closed to all pedestrian access. Buses will continue to travel through CPS, but will not stop there. No passengers will be allowed to board or exit buses in the station, or access the tunnel from the CPS entrance at 9th Avenue and Pine Street.
During this time please board or exit all tunnel buses at the other four tunnel stations, or at their regularly posted surface street stops before they enter or after they leave CPS. Sound Transit Link light rail service is expected to operate normally in the tunnel during this time.
Additionally, from about 9 a.m. to about 4 p.m. on Thursday, Pine Street will be closed west of I-5. During this closure there will be no bus service on Pine Street between I-5 and 3rd Avenue.
What will the 10, 11, 14, 43, and 49 do?
Weirdly there’s no normal reroute info in any of the places I’d normally look. It sort of looks like they might be taking Boren to Stewart (it only affects westbound buses), but that’s just my liberal interpretation of a blog post.
Last time Obama was in town, it did affect eastbound buses. We tried to take the 10 up the hill (not realizing it would be re-routed despite being a street over). The bus was directed off of Pike before 9th and eventually ended up past Olive in the triangle. The driver had no idea where he was supposed to go and said they hadn’t been told ahead of time where their re-route would go, so he just pulled over (there were a couple buses ahead of us too).
Hopefully it runs a bit smoother this time…
I was riding the 49 this morning. The driver was headed east on Pike, then stopped, moved the poles, and turned right on eighth. He then tried to turn right on Pine, but the police refused to let the bus pass, despite the fact that they were allowing westbound buses to continue down the hill.
After ten minutes waiting, I got off the bus and started walking.
When I got back to Pike street, I looked down the hill, and saw three more ETBs stranded under the convention center.
Sigh.
I saw a 49 eastbound on Madison this morning. East of Broadway.
I decided to walk down to the library and return a book on my way to work rather than walking to Westlake. As I passed Bellevue & Pine, two trolleybuses were attempting to go westbound. As I crossed Boren & University, I saw that the police had closed Pine Street at Boren. So I have no idea what the buses did, maybe Metro’s trucks ferried them around on Stewart Street? Or maybe all the other Broadway buses went down around Jackson like they do on snow days.
This stuff is insane. When did we start closing down buses, trains, streets, and city blocks whenever the President walked somewhere? Hell, there was a time when they didn’t do that for the King of England, and they had anarchist bombers then.
Friday, November 22, 1963